Do you want a horror story?
Go look up the Blue Slaad in the new Monster Manual (2025).
Where do you look? If you're like me - an old school D&D player - you look under Slaad. (Or Salad, because we
still make that joke and it's
still funny!)
And that's where it is. Great.
Now you look up the Blue Dragon. So, you turn to Dragon and... huh. No dragons. It's a game called
Dungeons & Dragons and it doesn't have dragons!
Once you've finished hyperventilating, you look under "B" for Blue and... there's the Blue Dragons and all its variants.
Cultists are grouped together.
- Cultist
- Cultist Fanatic
- Cultist Hierophant
- Aberrant Cultist
- Death Cultist
- Elemental Cultist
- Fiend Cultist
Yugoloths are spread throughout the book, much like demons and devils. And, as a result, have no text explaining what a yugoloth, demon or devil
is.
Back to the Blue Dragon. Here are the entries:
- Blue Dragon Wyrmling
- Young Blue Dragon
- Adult Blue Dragon
- Ancient Blue Dragon
And here are the Faerie Dragons:
- Faerie Dragon Adult
- Faerie Dragon Youth
That's a little inconsistent.
And then there's the renaming of monsters. We now have the "Animated Rug of Smothering". I'm not a fan, but at least they all go together under "Animated Objects".
Animated Objects
- Animated Armor
- Animated Broom
- Animated Flying Sword
- Animated Rug of Smothering
Oh, look they've done something similar for Fungi!
Fungi
- Gas Spore Fungus
- Shrieker Fungus
- Violet Fungus
- Violet Fungus Necrohulk
Sigh. I can see what they're trying for, but this is entirely the
opposite of what they've down with the dragons. Why are they grouping fungi together in the first place? Is there special Fungal lore or mechanical similarities we need to know?
"
Deadly Spores and Predatory Polyps
Habitat: Underdark;
Treasure: None
The dank, sunless Underdark is a fertile breeding ground for weird and dangerous fungi."
Nope, that's the entire text they have in the general Fungi section.
At least the Slaadi get a nice section explaining what they are. (Something the Yugoloths really wanted).
One of the troubles that the Arcanaloth has is that - if you're not familiar with D&D lore - you don't realise that it is a Yugoloth. So, I understand entirely the motivation behind putting it in alphabetical order. But then the book is completely inconsistent in how it handles everything else. You're meant to realise that "Fungus" is the key word for the fungi to say it's in a section together, while "Blue Dragon" is the keyword for the Young Blue Dragon (and not Dragon), but Blue Slaad is a Slaad not a Blue...
Elementals? Oh they're separated into "Air", "Earth", "Fire", "Water" not grouped together under Elemental.
Animals are all together in an appendix. (Though some aren't actually beasts, they're celestial or monstrosities and just look like animals). I sort of expected NPCs to have an appendix as well, but no - they're in the main text of the book, lurking.
If they'd gone full alphabetical, I could at least understand it. It's this half-hearted confusing mess that really irritates me. Especially when useful group information disappears because they decided that monsters needed to be ungrouped.
Argh!
